standards of quality and freshness!
What this group didn’t know about cooking they made up for in willingness to learn and to work, and the experience was more fun than I could have imagined. I was organized down to the last clove of garlic, but considering the variables – not the least among them the fact that I was nursing an infant Fiona – the results of the first session were near miraculous. The temporary kitchen, intended for one cook, at one point had seven people in it laughing, sautéeing, tasting as they went. There was just one French person with the group, a chef employed at the company’s central kitchen, and he had decided that he would go off on his own. He’d run out to the butcher while I was giving my talk about ingredients – being French, he didn’t need to hear it – and bought some lamb brains. As everyone worked and jostled in the kitchen, he’d carved out a little space to prepare the brains, which, I was certain, he would eat all by himself. I could have strangled him, but I held back. In any case, everything went so smoothly that we were all ready to sit down and begin our inaugural meal at 8 p.m., as I’d planned.
We had a terrific week going to markets and visiting artisan food producers, farmers, and pottery makers. We even visited an ancient wood-fired bread oven and everyone had a chance to wear the baker’s traditional Norman wooden clogs with their turned-up toes, slide loaves around in the oven, then see them emerge from the oven’s heat, their crusts popping and crackling. The baker opened jars of homemade jam and bottles of cider, and we had an unexpected feast in the small, timbered building. As we left, the baker gave a warm loaf to each person and we rode the bus back to Louviers in a haze of toasty aroma.
Our week culminated in a meal that Bruno and I prepared for the group, who had gone on a day-trip to the D-Day landing beaches. They returned just as we were putting the finishing touches to the seafood stew we’d prepared, but before we sat down Michael had some entertainment planned. He called everyone into the kitchen, opened champagne and poured glasses. He was preparing to install the centre island in the kitchen, and that afternoon had poured the small concrete pad where it would sit, which was still soft enough to take an imprint. After a toast to the group and the week, he asked each person to autograph the concrete. ‘You will be immortalized at On Rue Tatin,’ he said, and everyone cheered, then dropped to their knees and covered the concrete with their fanciful signatures. One day, should our house be excavated, the archaeologist will surely scratch her head over the signatures in the concrete pad!
The dinner table was set. On it were bottles of Côtes de Blaye and big baskets of Michael’s freshly made bread. Because this group was service-oriented, they jumped right into helping out, insisting that Bruno, Michael, Allison and I be waited on. It was a fitting end to an unbelievably warm, enjoyable week, and it heralded a happy future for a cooking school at On Rue Tatin.
After the group had gone, Michael returned to working on the kitchen, and I to writing and recipe testing. Michael installed the butcher’s work-bench, then proceeded to expand on it for the centre island. The butcher block top, which was about five feet long, had fissures in it the size of the Grand Canyon. We had bathed it with water for months, hoping the wood would expand, but the spaces remained. Michael cut the block into three pieces, which he trimmed and evened off, then stuck back together to make a shorter, smoother cutting surface. It still had small cracks in it, which Michael filled with beeswax, a food-friendly, aesthetically pleasing solution. We wanted the front of this graceful piece of furniture, with its two deep, curved drawers, to be what people saw when they entered the kitchen, so Michael put them facing forward. He built a frame that widened the piece and set the butcher block atop it at the back, on the stove side.
We hadn’t determined what our counter-tops would be. We’d tried poured concrete for the surfaces in the temporary kitchen, but it hadn’t held up as well as we’d hoped, and we’d also tried tile, which I found an unfriendly work surface, and hard to clean. We were considering all kinds of things when Michael came home from a materials buying trip one afternoon, excited about some end-lots of marble he’d seen. We went to take a look.
Here again, a limited budget worked in our favour. We wouldn’t have tried so many surfaces, nor looked so hard if we could have just gone out and purchased what we wanted. Thanks to Michael always looking for ways to make the budget stretch, here was a beautiful solution in the form of huge, polished squares of a marble that was luminous with ochre, dark pink, grey and a tinge of bluish green.
With the marble chosen, Michael could continue with the centre island. He first rounded the edges of the squares, then installed them opposite the butcher block. He incorporated a small sink to the right of the butcher block for washing vegetables, and underneath it he built two drawers, one for rubbish and the other for compost. He incorporated other drawers into the island, too, to accommodate all the paraphernalia of a family kitchen, from first-aid kit to napkins and bibs. In the centre of the island, between the wood and the marble, Michael inserted a wooden knife-holder that was flush with the surface. My knives fitted down into it, their blades separated by adjustable wooden pegs. Over the island he installed a beautiful, art deco chandelier we’d purchased several years before, which was, we discovered when we got it home, signed by the Frères Mueller from Lunéville, in Alsace.
We wanted to tile the entire twelve-foot-long back wall of the kitchen, as a backdrop for the gas stove. I wanted to use handmade tiles we’d seen in the Marais area of Paris, which came in a beautiful blanc cassé, soft white. We brought two of them home and set them on the counter, more as a tease than anything else, for their price would eat up the whole of the rest of our kitchen budget. Michael came home with many other tile samples, but none of them looked good next to those from the Marais. One day, though, he found some industrially made tiles he liked, and I went with him to take a look. They were nice and irregular, with a good shine and rich colour. We decided to use them, and Michael made the wall look as good as it would have with the tiles from the Marais, by mixing white and off-white to give the wall depth and subtle texture.
I wanted my copper pots to hang somewhere in the kitchen, both for the warmth their colour would add and for practicality, but we couldn’t figure out where to put them. I didn’t want them over the butcher block because they would block the view of the stove and the mantel, and our chandelier looked so graceful there. I couldn’t hang them against the tile wall because the counter top was too deep for them to be within easy reach.
I stood at the stove and reached up, as though reaching for a pot. I realized that if they hung inside the hood Michael had built, along the sides, they would not only look beautiful but would also be accessible to me yet out of the way. This is where they hang today, a perfect solution.
Michael built all the cabinets in the kitchen, which include twenty-two long drawers, each of which slides out to its full length. One of my favourite and most useful drawers is the tall, narrow one that sits next to the stove and is used to store baking sheets and odd-shaped baking pans. In this kitchen I would have the luxury of space and storage that I could only have imagined in kitchens of yore.
Michael laid a beautiful floor in half the kitchen that consisted of the ancient tiles he’d pulled up from the original kitchen floor, some old six-sided terracotta tiles called tommettes that had come from the hallway behind the kitchen, and small squares he cut from the marble that covered the counter-tops. The area where I would spend most of my time, between the stove and butcher block, the refrigerator and the sink, was floored with buttery old pine planks he’d lifted from the house’s original sitting room. They would be much kinder than tile or stone to my legs and back.
I’d wanted stone sinks like those in old farms and chateaux, but we didn’t find one easily and I wasn’t so devoted to the idea that I would go to any lengths to have one. I’ve always liked stainless steel, so Michael went about looking for a stainless steel sink that fitted the dimensions we wanted, long and wide enough to hold the removable pan under the stove burners, and shallow enough for ease and comfort. Needless to say, such a sink was nowhere to be found or ordered.
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